By Ron Patel
Publication Date: 2026-10-19 14:09:00
A $30 billion AI data center listing just died in under 48 hours. Firmus Grid is now begging the same investors who said no to an IPO for a private check instead.
Firmus Grid Ltd. didn’t just trim its IPO price. It pulled the whole listing. On October 9, the Australian AI data center developer withdrew its application to list on the Australian Securities Exchange, according to Bloomberg, abandoning a deal that had marketed shares at A$11 each, implying a valuation of roughly A$43.7 billion, or about $30 billion. That number was nearly triple the $10.5 billion Firmus was valued at just three months earlier.
The company now says it will raise $2 billion to $3 billion in a private round from existing backers instead, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the talks. Firmus has already pulled in more than $2.5 billion across two funding rounds this year alone.
Here’s the part that should worry anyone pricing an AI-adjacent company right now: investors weren’t choking on the business itself. Firmus has real customers. It has two operational data centers, in Australia and Singapore, with five more under development across the Asia-Pacific, and it counts Nvidia, Meta Platforms and OpenAI among its backers and compute partners. What they choked on was $51 million in annual revenue sitting under a $30 billion price tag, a multiple even AI bulls apparently couldn’t swallow.
Bankers reportedly floated cutting the valuation to somewhere between $20 billion and $25…
